From Seed to Salad: Virginia Western Brings Hydroponic Lettuce Labs to Roanoke High Schools

From Seed to Salad: Virginia Western Brings Hydroponic Lettuce Labs to Roanoke High Schools

ROANOKE, Va. — Virginia Western Community College has launched a five-week hydroponics module across Roanoke-area high school classrooms to spark student interest in careers that blend agriculture and technology.

Hands-on ag‑tech learning

The classroom unit uses a vertical hydroponic tower to grow Buttercrunch lettuce in 28 grow cups. A NIWA Grow Hub sensor monitors humidity, temperature, light and other environmental variables and generates graphical data students can analyze. Students program the system to run the pump and LED lighting on roughly a 16-hour daily schedule, and nutrients are added to the tower reservoir to support soilless growth.

Short lessons, long learning

Cynthia Fairbanks, Ag‑Tech Program Assistant and adjunct professor in Virginia Western’s School of STEM, leads the initiative. During the five-week project she visits classrooms weekly for 15-minute lessons that combine practical tower maintenance, data collection and discussion of what the charts mean. An iPad in the classroom links to the NIWA Grow Hub so students can watch data trends in real time and track each plant’s progress.

“We created this program to allow high-school students to see a real-life project combining agriculture and technology,” Fairbanks said. “The program teaches hands-on skills with technology and agriculture and opens the conversation of data literacy.”

From data to dinner

Students are assigned individual plants to monitor weekly — measuring leaf growth and judging the right harvest time from both observations and sensor data. In week four, Engineering Program students at Roanoke County’s Burton Center for Arts & Technology sampled the lettuce, calling it fresh, crunchy and not bitter. In the final week Fairbanks guided students through interpreting graphs and identifying key takeaways.

“Seeing that all of our statistics were in the correct levels the entire five weeks can prove to us that’s why our plants did so well,” Fairbanks told the class. “The lettuce tastes good, and it’s tripled in size from a couple of weeks ago.”

Officials celebrated the program’s conclusion with a Salad Day: Fairbanks provided toppings, dressings and sourdough bread bites while each student snipped a head of lettuce from the tower to assemble a fresh salad.

“This was an incredible experience for the kids,” said Sarah Gerrol, engineering teacher at Burton. “They get to see what they eat in the grocery store and how it’s grown — from a seed, to a sprout, to 25 leaves of lettuce in one pot.”

Expansion plans

School officials report the module will run this fall at the City of Roanoke’s Charles W. Day Technical Education Center and Lord Botetourt High School, with plans to add more sites next spring. Amy White, Dean of STEM at Virginia Western, said the college aims to grow the program to connect students and faculty with hands-on workforce and talent development opportunities in ag‑tech.

Program details at a glance:

• Duration: five weeks
• Crop: Buttercrunch lettuce
• System: 28-cup vertical hydroponic tower + NIWA Grow Hub
• Instruction: weekly 15-minute lessons, real-time data visualization
• Culmination: student-harvested Salad Day

This hands-on module emphasizes data literacy, experimental control of environmental variables and the intersection of engineering and agriculture, giving students practical exposure to modern food-production technology.